26 mai 2010

Intellectual Quotient

Are you an Einstein or a dummy who won't be able to do anything good of her/his life? That is what people expect to know from their Intellectual Quotient. Even some psychologists give such value to the IQ. But really, what is it?

I cannot argue having the absolute truth for no absolute truth exists. Actually, I cannot even really argue demystifying the IQ perception since many so-called professionals seem to have it wrong.

But anyway, this is how the social and human sciences work: there are theories and professionals contradict each other.

What it's not

The Intellectual Quotient does not measure how intelligent or how stupid you are on a particular scale. I once even read about a scale of IQ results with given comparative examples. e.g. genius = level of a professor, gifted = level of an undergraduate. This doesn't mean anything.

I guess the biggest mistake people tend to make when trying to understand and/or explain what the Intellectual Quotient describes is emphasizing on its quantitative representation. Assessing the IQ needs qualitative exercises too. These cannot be found in the "IQ tests" you complete online or when going for job interviews.

To be able to call an IQ test an accurate one, it needs not to focus on specific types of exercises but cover a wide range so as to include a maximum number of possibilities for one's various types of intelligence - seven main of which are linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily kinesthetic, spatial, musical, inerpersonal, intrapersonal - to be stimulated.

What it is

The Intellectual Quotient describes how one's brain works. The Intellectual Quotient doesn't reveal if you are intelligent or not since intelligence itself is relative to the intellectual culture and norms of your environment. It rather describes how you wire in and process information and somehow defines your major intellectual and emotional character traits.

Good IQ tests are carried out by psychologists. Some chose not to divulge the oh so phantasized score obtained so as not to create what I would call an IQ consciousness and/or complex.

The Intellectual Quotient helps in the understanding of someone's intellectual and emotional profile. A utopian educational system would, for example, take the Intellectual Quotient into consideration so as to have adapted means to deliver the syllabus to each and every student. The present global educational system is more likely to use the IQ to do a streaming for unhealthy competition unfortunately.

We all have more than one type of intelligence(listed above) that is actually developped. We can assume that working accordingly to someone's IQ not only helps to input knowledge in that person's brain but also to develop the other types of intelligence, at least to a certain extent.

Oh Myths!

Also, there is no better way of processing information than another. All of them have their specifities and are okay. We however have to say that, in the mainstream of the World we live in, the luckier ones are those whose mathematical-logical and linguistic intelligences are more developped.

The genius is called a genius because she/he unwillingly assimilates more information from her/his environment through the various types of intelligence she/he possesses and which are well-developped. I like to insist on the fact that it is unwilling. I am pretty uncomfortable with the 'IQ categories' names' for if you call the 'highest ranges' genius, gifted and above average, you should, for example, call dyslexics 'deprived'. This is pure aberration! Being gifted, just as being dyslexic requires a peculiar structure for learning and growing up.

As a matter of fact, 40% of gifted people "and above" are literally failing at school. Among the 60% left, a part is in denial; most of the time, one recovers the denial at adolescence. The ones being in the IQ 'top ranges' are seldomly the ones to accumulate academic success unless they find proper methods of learning/being taught.

I shall conclude leaving you to agree or disagree that maybe parents should play down knowing "is my child intelligent?" and focus on "how can I help my child bloom?"